And it’s not about me anymore..

Weight: 68.8kgFeeling: No longer afraid of the 70kg mark

Week 34: People have been saying that I’m small for this period of pregnancy. NO LONGER!

It’s been a weird week for blogging hasn’t it. First a post on a Friday – which was an extra special post for the week, outside of my regular posting days, and now a Sunday post – which I haven’t done in the longest time!

What is going on?

Yeah, well, next week is going to be a mad busy week AGAIN. Meetings and appointments for the full first half of the week, and let’s not even talk about trying to get all my Christmas cards churned out in time by next weekend so that I can send them out in time to reach my clients…

There’s just so many things to do!! But while I’m not really behind, it does mean that if I don’t get this bit of writing done today, you won’t hear from me until the midweek update.

That being said, since I treated you to a post on Friday, I will see how I can keep this post today shorter than usual. I hear the Christmas Cards begging to be written so I can check that thing off my to-do list…

Right, so we had our obgyn visit yesterday. It wasn’t quite a regular obgyn visit – we were scheduled for a detailed ultrasound scan with a full doppler (an ultrasound test uses reflected sound waves to see how blood flows through a blood vessel. It helps doctors evaluate blood flow through major arteries and veins).

So we were a little apprehensive to what would turn out, yet quite excited to what we might be able to see in this visit – would we see a little heart pumping, and maybe Baby’s face and features would be more pronounced at this scan…

Anyway, waking up uber early on a Saturday morning, even for a scan, is no easy feat. I swear I was drained for the rest of the day and of course given the results of the scan..

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

So I got my tummy squirted with nicely warmed gel so that the ultrasound beeping thingy could glide across my belly properly and I lay in the elevated bench-chair for a good 15 minutes, letting the technician do what she needed to do to get the readings for the baby.

This particular technician was an older lady who was actually very reassuringly thorough with her methods. She said that she was going to do some things that weren’t normally required in the scan requested – like just looking at the amniotic fluid and just ensuring the structure and stuff of Baby were sound.

That was quite nice to know, because at the rate the ultrasounds cost, it’d be good to get as many things checked out as possible while I’m propped up on that table-chair with my shorts opened up and my belly exposed.

One thing that we realised about the ultrasound that we did on Saturday was that apparently different technicians have different “standards” when it comes to viewing the pictures on the screen. This was actually the time we really could NOT make head or tail out of what the lady was taking screenshots of!

It’s quite disconcerting actually, and frankly a bit irritating having to keep asking her to explain what we were looking at.

Now that’s not to say that we think we’re very good at looking at ultrasound scans. Heck, in the first few scans that we did – when baby was still forming himself, we seriously couldn’t make out the entire body shape at all, much less appendages and facial features.

But give that we have quite a number of scans already for the past few weeks, I would’ve thought that we may have gotta at least SLIGHTLY better at it.

Moving On, when we looked at the results of the ultrasound after everything, we were quite shocked that the markers had barely moved from the week before and that things were getting rather stagnant. Not dropped of course, but the implications of things being stagnant as I mentioned in last week’s update, meant that the doctor might be looming over getting us to induce the baby to come out.

I had actually swung by my obgyn’s clinic that morning to check if I needed to come by the office with the results so that my obgyn could walk us through what they meant, but knowing he wasn’t in town, figured that it would’ve been ok if we waited a few more days to see.

We were also pretty sure that human error might have had a little part to play in how one takes measurements too – given how the pictures this technician took were really almost undecipherable. One part of us said to just leave it, anyway there’re still days to go til the next scan, and things can still pick up in the next week.

But something was nagging at me to just get things confirmed so after having read through the results and not being able to make heads or tails out of it, we decided that it was better not to wait and to ask the receptionists to try and arrange something with the other obgyns in his practice.

We had a bit of a wait, but we got to see someone and I can tell you, were we ever glad that we made the decision to hang around and ask for a doctor’s opinion of the results.

So it turns out that there are these arteries that feed the uterus and the baby right. And one of my arteries is facing a bit of resistance in the blood flow – which means that the blood can’t get to baby and baby can’t get the nutrition in the blood.

Now I know that doesn’t exactly sound reassuring, but when we found out that my artery flow issue thing had nothing to do with baby’s health, it was a huge sigh of relief. I mean. The baby is 100% healthy, all his organs were growing well and intact, and he’s practically perfect in every way.

I even made sure to ask the doctor to confirm that it was a ME issue and not a baby issue.

Better for me to be the issue than our bundle of joy, for sure.

That’s a parents’ love for their child I guess. And it really never struck me up until that moment about how ready I was to be a mother for my child.

Anyway, more good news was that the doctor said that artery thing was really very easily solved too. No medication or further testing or that kind of complicated stuff. All I needed to do, was EAT.

Like literally, even if I didn’t want to, or wouldn’t normally have a bit of a craving for something to nibble on, my new objective is to now make sure that I’m constantly putting something in my mouth. No questions asked.

And suddenly all this nonsense about how I wanted to try and keep my weight under 70kg so that i could get back into shape faster after popping flew out the window. BRING ON THE POUNDS.

My new mummy friends have been really quite lovely amidst all of this too – the ladies have been quite diligent at messaging the whatsapp chats whenever they have their own gynae visits – and I’m now really learning to appreciate the myriad of different opinions and advice that come flowing in.

One of my mummy friends actually said that she had a similar issue with her first kid not properly absorbing nutrition – if she ate 10 steaks, baby would only absorb 1. So what did she do? She ate LOTS of steak and gained 22kg for her first bub.

MY HERO.

(not that I wouldn’t mind eating that much steak :D)

And I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, about how if baby is small, then at least a natural birth might truly be a lot more doable, with a lot less stretching for my vajayjay to do too. Anyway 1.8kg really isn’t THAT far away from the stipulated 2.2kg that baby is supposed to be at the 34 weeks milestone. And this is from the Eurasian/Caucasian scale at that.

So I’m going to endeavour to eat more this coming week. Right after we heard the news from the doctor, the hubs and I made a jaunt to our lovely neighbourhood NTUC and stocked up on so much frozens and snacks that I hopefully won’t want for anything during the day when he’s at work and I’m looking for something to feed the hungry baby in my tummy.

I AM a little worried about over-gorging myself. And I’m really quite sure that I won’t be hungry ALL the time, but a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do for her unborn child.

So now that baby’s growth issue is hopefully all taken care of with all of this, here’s just hoping that while I have to “force myself to eat” that I don’t start getting digestion issues alongside uncomfortable bloat.